State of the Site 10/10 — Revving up the Engines!

It’s ac­tu­al­ly been a lit­tle while since we had our last lit­tle sit down. Seriously, it was March of this year. Damn! We all got a lit­tle busier than ex­pect­ed over the sum­mer, de­spite what we had hoped to do by as men­tioned in that pre­vi­ous site news post­ing. Thus is life, though.

Despite our slow sum­mer burn, we’ve still been around and kick­ing! Mostly pro­duc­ing video over on the SuperNerdTube site, with the oc­ca­sion­al draft ar­ti­cle that we ac­tu­al­ly end up fin­ish­ing. Shout outs to Micheal Campbell for his con­tin­u­ing OG Chan web com­ic se­ries (on its two-year an­niver­sary!), and Jason plus the Graded Point Five pod­cast crew for be­ing the most pro­duc­tive of the group dur­ing this time!

So what was up with the slow­ness this sum­mer? For those who don’t know al­ready, we han­dle SuperNerdLand stuff on a vol­un­teer ba­sis as a project that’s a hob­by. We have a “life first” fo­cus, and most of us have been fair­ly busy with things like tak­ing care of health, work­ing, and mov­ing. So, as the in­ter­nal mot­to goes, life came first.

But we have been ramp­ing up to more reg­u­lar con­tent com­ing out! We’ve got a pret­ty steady stream sched­ule con­struct­ed, and you can al­ways see the most up to date ver­sion on our Live page. I also have some drafts I will be fin­ish­ing soon. The shock! We are go­ing to have an­oth­er re­view com­ing in the near fu­ture from our res­i­dent SuperNerdLIVE mum, Martyr, cov­er­ing the re­cent­ly re­leased Mary Skelter: Nightmares, and hope­ful­ly even a movie re­view or two, also!

Speaking of stream­ing, it brings me to the oth­er pur­pose of SuperNerdLand, be­sides it be­ing a hob­by project for us. It also serves as a tech­nol­o­gy test­ing bed, as we are ever the tin­ker­ers. And we have re­al­ly got­ten some nice tech to­geth­er for our cus­tom live stream­ing so­lu­tion.

For over a year, we have used Nimble stream­er from wmspanel.com, along with their con­trol pan­el ser­vice, to pro­vide our­selves a cus­tom stream­ing so­lu­tion. Since then we’ve toyed around with pro­to­cols and video play­ers, chat apps and lay­outs. And I am re­al­ly damn ex­cit­ed to say we are near so­lid­i­fy­ing a damn nice com­bo of so­lu­tions.

The folks at wmspanel.com re­cent­ly in­tro­duced a low la­ten­cy and low over­head stream­ing pro­to­col, as well as a play­er to sup­port it, called SLDP. It’s HTML5 play­er has been su­per light­weight and re­spon­sive, and has been work­ing very well in test­ing. We also re­cent­ly found out about a very in­ter­est­ing project in TitanEmbeds.com. They pro­vide a web-based Discord client, as well as re­lay bot with web­hooks, to be able to use our Discord serv­er as a chat for our stream­ing page. Bonus is that it sup­ports guest users, so one can just en­ter a name and start chat­ting with­out a Discord ac­count or lo­gin!

It’s all been work­ing fan­tas­ti­cal­ly so far, and it’s a great so­lu­tion for our in­de­pen­dent stream­ing. We’ve been very pleased to say the least. We are also test­ing out how the serv­er han­dles transcod­ing on its own, so some of our more band­width heavy streams will have adap­tive bi­trate op­tions (with­out re­stream­ing to an out­side web­site)!

Meanwhile, I’ve want­ed to get back into a pub­lish­ing for­mat that we test­ed out last year and loved. You may re­mem­ber that in the mid­dle of 2016 we tried out an is­sue based dig­i­tal mag­a­zine for­mat. You can catch those over here.

It was a blast work­ing on con­tent in that fash­ion, and re­al­ly al­lowed us a great pub­lish­ing sched­ule with what free time we had, as well as had read­ers get­ting into more ar­ti­cles in one vis­it. And I want to bring that back! Since I am still get­ting things to­geth­er on that, I don’t want to promise a con­crete date on the re­turn of the mag­a­zine for­mat. While I want it to be soon­er rather than lat­er, let’s say we’ll have that rolling by the start of 2018. Then we can present­ly sur­prise our­selves if we do it soon­er!

Despite our low­ered out­put through this busy year in our oth­er lives, the sup­port we’ve got from you all has been amaz­ing. We wouldn’t be here with­out you, and we may not have the biggest au­di­ence yet, but those of you out there are all won­der­ful hu­man be­ings. Don’t let any­one else tell you oth­er­wise.

Small bit of gush­ing too for the peo­ple with the site; the reg­u­lars, the oc­ca­sion­al posters, and the ones that just hang out. Those of you SuperNerdLand folks read­ing this, the most love. And I hope you are ready for hype go­ing into the next year!

Josh has worked in IT for over 15 years. Graduated Broadcasting school in 2012 with a fo­cus on A/V pro­duc­tion. Amateur pho­tog­ra­ph­er with a pas­sion to make things work… by any means nec­es­sary. Editor-in-Chief and do-er of tech things at SuperNerdLand